The Development of Caregiving: A Comparison of Attachment Theory and Psychoanalytic Approaches to Mothering

“Do not ride your bicycle around the corner,” the mother had told the daughter when she was seven. “Why not?” protested the girl. “Because then I cannot see you and you will fall down and cry and I will not hear you.” “How do you know I'll fall?” whined the girl. “It is in the book, The Twenty Six Malignant Gates, all of the bad things that can happen to you outside the protection of this house.” … It would have been enough to think that even one of these dangers could befall a child … my mother worried about them all …. So by taking them all into account, she had absolute faith she could prevent every one of them.

ATTACHMENT THEORY AND PSYCHOANALYSIS ARE FOUNDED on the premise of the ultimate importance of mothering. Both theoretical traditions emphasize that the sensitive, responsive, empathic mother who is behaviorally or intrapsychically attuned to her child fosters development and helps buffer her child from psychopathology. In contrast, the insensitive, narcissistic, or unempathic mother is seen as placing the child at developmental and pathological risk. Despite the shared emphasis on the importance of the mother, these traditions have approached mothering almost exclusively in terms of the psychological experience of the child. Little attention has been paid in either tradition to the fact that mothering has its own developmental trajectory and is a separate, autonomous motivational system.

Attachment theory conceives of maternal behavior as motivated and organized by the caregiving behavioral system. Bowlby (1969) described the caregiving system only briefly in his writing, however, and there has been little